Sketchblog

Finally found some time to try out the amazing Photoshop Brushes of Kyle T. Webster. If you don’t have them yet, get them. I have the megapack and it’s totally worth it’s price.

A quick portrait of my friend and mentor, Chris Oatley. Probably the mellowest guy in animation and a man with a heart made of gold.

Chris is the host of my favorite podcast, the Artcast, and also the mastermind behind the Oatley Academy, an online art school where you can get your Painting and also Storytelling skills on to the next level.

This site annoys me. There are a couple of things that bother me and that could be improved. As probably any Designer in any point in time, I want to tear down my website and redesign it from the ground up. I did this a couple of times already and would have a couple of places to start from.

But this time it isn’t about me, it’s about you. Designers tend to be narcisstic by nature, but this website doesn’t exist only for me to look at my own stuff on the web. It’s purpose is to reach people out there and resonate. The most carefully crafted message is wasted if it doesn’t reach it’s recipient.

I need to know what currently works and what doesn’t, and instead of guessing that for myself, I need to hear that from you. To gather your feedback, I created a little typeform. It takes only 5 minutes to answer.

„What do I get out of this?“, you might ask yourself. Well, first of all, you get the warm, fuzzy feeling of helping out a really cool dude. And if that alone wasn’t enough, you also get the chance of winning one of 5 prints of mine. The survey is available in german or english.

Take the survey in german

Take the survey in english

Currently I’m taking a course called „The Spark“ at the Oatley Academy. It’s an online course with about 15 students and our amazing Teacher Sarah Marino. The course is challenging, but we learn a ton and it’s a lot of fun.

As a course project we’re doing Visual Development for a story. That means we’re designing the characters, designing layouts (rough sketches of a certain scene), props (pretty much all the stuff characters interact with, lamps, weapons, furniture, etc.) and more.

One of the characters I’m designing is the Giant. He is, well, giant, not the brightest star under the sun and also not a very pleasant guy to hang around.

While going through the color variations I found that it would be cool if he had white eyes, just to make him even a little less human and even more frightning.

What do you think? How does the final design feel to you? Let me know in the comments.

Here’s a glimpse into a secret project.

I did this sketch back in march, yet never posted it. I think I hated it at that time. Now I’ve found it again while browsing through sketches looking for something else. The composition is really bad: The monster takes up way too much space in the picture and there’s no room for the image to breathe. The graphic designer would talk about white space here. Also the point that we’re on a different planet in space is not coming across.

I still like the creature and the idea of that poor idiot trying to steal the baby monster from the mother. It’s an ancient story told in infinite ways already, yet still something that makes for great action.

Buck „the Bear“ was always considered a bit heavy handed, but a man that got things done.